He wants schools that consistently refuse to bring sexual diversity to the attention of students to get financial penalties or administrative action taken. Van Dijk thinks the information contributes to the fight against discrimination.

Mandatory

According to the Inspectorate of Education education about homosexuality is not given on 20 percent of all primary and secondary schools, while this is mandatory since 2012.

Parliament also wants lessons on acceptance of gay people to be required in secondary vocational schools. About forty percent of these schools do not do that now.

In the center of Loppersum in Groningen province during works on a sewer a set of 48 gold coins from the 16th century has been found. …

Archaeologist John Tuinstra calls it a very rare find. “Finds of this magnitude are rare. I’ve never experienced this in my career.” He thinks that the coins were hidden during raids around 1590. The owner at that time may have been killed because he would not tell where he had hidden his treasure.

The treasure is between 25,000 and 30,000 euros worth according to Tuinstra. The coins are now owned by the province of Groningen. On May 20 the coins will be on display for a day at the town hall of Loppersum.

It should become an annual tradition, the Easter fire at the Roggebotstaete estate in Dronten. But a little bird threw a spanner in the works. A great tit built a nest in the woodpile.

Lennard Duijvestijn has to laugh, but is secretly also disappointed a little: “We have made a large woodpile six meters high and wanted to invite everyone; then along comes this bird.”.

At Roggebotstaete estate nature is a high priority. “That the great tit precisely chose this stake among all the trees to nest is also very funny,” says Duivesteijn. He lets the bird nest quietly. “We just postpone the Easter fire, and when all eggs will have hatched and the young birds will have fledged then we we will set it on fire.”

Incidentally, the great tit is not the only bird seeking refuge at the woodpile. Employees also saw a wagtail fly in and back again.

Rising income inequality in the United States means that wealthy Americans can now expect to live up to 15 years longer than their poorest counterparts, the Lancet finds in a new series, “America, all things not being equal.” The research follows a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in December showing that overall life expectancy in the US fell between 2014 and 2015 for the first time since 1993.

In the first part of the Lancet series, “Inequality and the health-care system in the USA,” the British medical journal’s researchers found that these income-based disparities in US life expectancy are worsened by the for-profit US health care system itself, which relies on private insurers, pharmaceutical companies and health care chains. It is also the most expensive health system in the world.

The life expectancy gap between rich and poor has been widening since the 1970s. Since this time, the share of total income going to the top 1 percent has more than doubled, while the vast majority of workers have seen their incomes stagnate or decline in real terms.

Today women in the top 1 percent of income can expect to live 10.1 years longer than the bottom 1 percent of women earners; men in the top 1 percent can expect to live 14.6 years longer than the bottom 1 percent.

By comparison, more than 1.6 million US households, including 3.5 million children, struggle to survive on less than $2 per person per day, the World Health Organization’s definition of extreme poverty.

Health care costs

It is a cruel irony that the US health care system is one of the main drivers of poor health and low life expectancy, particularly burdening low-income households with rising costs. Many patients are unable to pay for the medical care they need, with some forgoing care altogether.

In 2014, after full implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), 19 percent of non-elderly adults who received prescriptions could not afford to fill them. The Lancet research shows that health care costs—including insurance premiums, taxes and out-of-pocket payments—are forcing millions of Americans to cut back on food, heat, housing and other basic necessities.

Millions of middle class families have been driven to bankruptcy by illness and medical bills. Medical bills comprise more than half of all unpaid personal debts sent to collection agencies. Meanwhile, the super-rich are turning to “concierge practices” where they pay out of pocket to gain access to a wide-range of high-priced medical specialists.

Disparities in access to health care can be largely attributed to insurance status. Despite an increase in those insured under the ACA, largely due to the expansion of Medicaid (the insurance program jointly administered by the federal government and the states), 27 million Americans remain uninsured. These include people in those states that opted out of the Medicaid expansion, as well as an estimated 5-6 million undocumented immigrants who are excluded from coverage under what is popularly known as Obamacare.

The uninsured are far more likely to go without needed doctor visits, tests, treatments and medications due to cost. This is especially true for those with chronic conditions. The Lancet gives the example of uninsured individuals with diabetes, who spend on average $1,446 out of pocket on medical expenses each year.

Among patients who develop an acute myocardial infarction (heart attack), those who are uninsured are 38 percent more likely than the insured with low out-of-pocket costs to delay emergency care. Poor Americans under the age of 50 are also far less likely to receive recommended flu and pneumonia vaccinations and cancer screening tests than their wealthy counterparts.

In the private insurance market, which includes Obamacare plans, patient cost-sharing—including co-pays and deductibles—has increased substantially since the 2000s. ACA plans have some of the highest deductibles, averaging $3,064 for “silver” plans in 2016. More than 80 percent of employer-based plans now include an annual deductible, averaging $1,478 in 2016, 2.5 times more than the 2006 average.

When cost-sharing forces patients to forgo care, in some cases doctors and hospitals fill their empty appointment slots and beds with patients who are less “price sensitive,” i.e., able to pay more out of pocket.

“Underinsurance” and access to care

The researchers refer to the growing phenomenon of “underinsurance,” writing: “Rising deductibles and other forms of cost sharing by patients have eroded the traditional definition of insurance: protection from the financial harms of illness.” In other words, while many people technically have insurance coverage, they often cannot afford to use it due to skyrocketing premiums and high out-of-pocket costs.

Geography is often an indicator of access to care, with those living in rural areas finding it difficult to obtain primary and specialty care. Many rural and Southern states also have a shortage of family planning resources. Women in Lubbock, Texas, for example, now live more than 250 miles away from the nearest abortion clinic, a result of reactionary anti-abortion restrictions imposed by the state.

Women overall are at a disadvantage in obtaining and paying for medical care compared to men, due to greater health care needs, including reproductive care. Although fewer women are uninsured, those who are insured have higher out-of-pocket costs, with these costs averaging $233 higher than men’s in 2013. While their costs are higher, women’s median incomes are 39 percent lower than men’s.

A Princeton University study presented last month showed a sharp rise in the mortality rate for white, middle-aged working class Americans driven by “deaths of despair,” those due to drug overdoses, complications from alcohol abuse and suicide. The Lancet research shows, however, that despite this crisis access to care for mental illness and substance abuse is woefully inadequate and underfunded.

Psychiatric providers, for substance abuse in particular, are in short supply on a national scale, especially in poor and rural areas. America’s bloated prison system, incarcerating more than 2.4 million in its prisons and jails nationwide, remains the largest “inpatient mental health” facilities in the US. “Treatments” afforded mentally ill patients often include segregation and solitary confinement.

Paradoxically, the US medical system, as the employer of nearly 17 million Americans, exacerbates health care inequality. While physicians and many nurses are generally well paid, many other health care workers are not. The health care system employs more than 20 percent of all black female workers, and more than a quarter of these women subsist on family incomes below 150 percent of the federal poverty line; 12.9 percent of them are uninsured.

How will Blairite Dutch Finance Secretary and Eurogroup boss Jeroen Dijsselbloem explain this? Probably, he will say: ‘Poor people die so much earlier than super rich people because they are stupid, lazy and spend their money on booze and women‘. And maybe he still wonders why his PvdA political party went from 38 to 9 MPS in the recent Dutch election.

When cartoonist and marine-biology teacher Steve Hillenburg created SpongeBob SquarePants in 1999, he may have backed the wrong side of one of the longest-running controversies in the field of evolutionary biology.

For the last decade, zoologists have been battling over the question, “What was the oldest branch of the animal family tree?” Was it the sponges, as they had long thought, or was it a distinctly different set of creatures, the delicate marine predators called comb jellies? The answer to this question could have a major impact on scientists’ thinking about how the nervous system, digestive tract and other basic organs in modern animals evolved.

Now, a team of evolutionary biologists from Vanderbilt University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison have devised a new approach designed specifically to settle contentious phylogenetic tree-of-life issues like this. The new approach comes down squarely on the side of comb jellies.

For nearly a century, scientists organized the animal family tree based in large part on their judgement of the relative complexity of various organisms. Because of their comparative simplicity, sponges were considered to be the earliest members of the animal lineage. This paradigm began to shift when the revolution in genomics began providing vast quantities of information about the DNA of an increasing number of species. Evolutionary biologists started to apply this wealth of information to refine and redefine evolutionary relationships, creating a new field called phylogenomics. In most cases, the DNA data helped clarify these relationships. In a number of instances, however, it gave rise to controversies that intensified as more and more data accumulated.

In 2008, one of the early phylogenomic studies fingered the comb jellies (aka ctenophores) as the earliest members of the animal kingdom, rather than sponges. This triggered an ongoing controversy with the latest round being a massive study published last month that marshalled an unprecedented array of genetic data to support the sponges’ position as the first animal offshoot.

“The current method that scientists use in phylogenomic studies is to collect large amounts of genetic data, analyze the data, build a set of relationships and then argue that their conclusions are correct because of various improvements they have made in their analysis,” said Antonis Rokas, Cornelius Vanderbilt Professor of Biological Sciences, who devised the new approach with Vanderbilt postdoctoral scholar Xing-Xing Shen and Assistant Professor Chris Todd Hittinger from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “This has worked extremely well in 95 percent of the cases, but it has led to apparently irreconcilable differences in the remaining 5 percent.”

Rokas and his collaborators decided to focus on 18 of these controversial relationships (seven from animals, five from plants and six from fungi) in an attempt to figure out why the studies have produced such strongly contradictory results. To do so, they got down into the weeds, genetically speaking, and began comparing the individual genes of the leading contenders in each relationship.

“In these analyses, we only use genes that are shared across all organisms,” Rokas said. “The trick is to examine the gene sequences from different organisms to figure out who they identify as their closest relatives. When you look at a particular gene in an organism, let’s call it A, we ask if it is most closely related to its counterpart in organism B? Or to its counterpart in organism C? And by how much?”

These analyses typically involve hundreds to thousands of genes. The researchers determined how much support each gene provides to one hypothesis (comb-jellies first) over another (sponges first). They labeled the resulting difference a “phylogenetic signal.” The correct hypothesis is the one that the phylogenetic signals from the most genes consistently favor.

In this fashion, they determined that comb jellies have considerably more genes which support their “first to diverge” status in the animal lineage than do sponges.

Another contentious relationship the researchers addressed was whether crocodiles are more closely related to birds or turtles. They found that 74 percent of the shared genes favor the hypothesis that crocodiles and turtles are sister lineages while birds are close cousins.

In the course of their study, they also discovered that in a number of contentious cases one or two “strongly opinionated genes” among all the genes being analyzed appear to be causing the problem because the statistical methods that evolutionary biologists have been using are highly susceptible to their influence.

In some cases, such as the controversies over the origins of flowering plants and modern birds, they determined that the removal of even a single opinionated gene can flip the results of an analysis from one candidate to another. In cases like this, the researchers were forced to conclude that the available data is either inadequate to support a definitive conclusion or it indicates that the diversification occurred too rapidly to resolve.

“We believe that our approach can help resolve many of these long-standing controversies and raise the game of phylogenetic reconstruction to a new level,” Rokas said.